Angel in the Parlor (19 page)

“Downtown.”

He did not tell her that it was Prince Street and he had gone to see Amyas. No, not Amyas himself, but the residence of Amyas, as one makes a pilgrimage to see Beethoven's house or Grace Kelly's swimming pool, comfortably assured of not meeting the real object of one's worship. That Sunday morning everything felt as still and changeless as a prayer lettered in gold and touched with peace.
Doll Manufacturing Company. Bolts and Parts.
The make-up shop, its windows boarded over. The vacant handball court. The newspaper store.

Nicholas went in, brushing past layers of magazines clipped on wires like an elaborate quilt. An old man who was reading and stroking his gray moustache stood up behind the counter.

“One egg cream,” said Nicholas.

It was a spring day and he was much younger, loitering around the playground after school.

“Nice day,” said the old man, smiling as he watched Nicholas drink till the air in the empty straw made a loud noise. Nicholas pushed the paper cup away.

“I'm trying to find a fellow named Amyas Axel,” he said. “Do you ever see him much?”

“The big fat fella? I knew who he was, but I never run into him myself. Did you say you're trying to find him?”

“Yes,” said Nicholas.

“Well, he's dead.”

“I—”

He could not bring out the words; he did not know what the right words were.

“I didn't see it happen. Some kids who live in the building told me he tried to fly out the window. He had some kind of flying machine and he stuck a pair of wings on himself and just took off. Jumped clean out the window.”

Nicholas said nothing but felt himself turning to stone.

“He didn't have no family. There wasn't nobody to tell about it. The police carted him away like a dead horse.”

The man allowed a few minutes' respectful silence before he said, “That'll be fifteen cents for the egg cream.”

Fumbling in his pocket for the change, Nicholas touched the shape of a coin caught in the lining. A coin? A medal, wishing him a safe journey, a medal from Amyas? Wasn't the jacket a gift from Amyas, too? He tore the jacket off his back, threw it on the counter, and fled.

Although he did not speak of Amyas's death to Janet, the weight of his new knowledge bowed him. During dinner, he could not concentrate on her plans for repainting the living room white and buying a formica table for the kitchen. That night she showed him a new nightgown she had bought, a high-waisted cotton print with full sleeves and a velvet sash, and when she crawled into bed beside him, smelling of perfume and new flannel, he could not restrain himself.

“Did you buy it for Amyas?”

Janet shrugged. Then she said, “You went to visit Amyas today, didn't you?”

“Yes,” said Nicholas.

“How is he?”

“Dead.”

She gave a sudden jerk.

“He jumped out the window last week.”

Silence, broken only with difficulty.

“Oh, Nicholas, even when he's dead, he's still got us in the palm of his hand,” whispered Janet, and started to cry.

Nicholas couldn't bear that; he shook her and pulled her face against him.

“Cut it out. Listen, Janet, can't you just think of him as someone who brought us together?”

She sniffled a little, then allowed herself to curl up against him, and each knew who the other was thinking of and Nicholas knew it was best to say nothing because he felt that they were lying under one huge shadow, like two creatures curled together in one womb that carried them still. He would not let himself cry until Janet fell asleep. But when his heart showed him that huge man bedded down in the sticks and stones of Potter's Field, he thought his whole body would burst with grief.

8 Essays

6

The One Who Goes Out at the Cry of Dawn: The Secret Process of Stories

I wonder how many writers can remember the person or the experience that called them to their craft. If you ask a dozen writers why they started writing, their answers will be as various as their work. One might name a parent who encouraged him, another would name a teacher who loaned her books. Several might mention a creative writing class they took in college. Somebody might say, “I wrote my first sonnet when I fell in love.” Falling in love has made poets out of many who abandoned the calling when they fell out of it.

It was neither a teacher nor a parent that called me. It was a dream. I was three years old and not yet going to school. As I could not write, I was forced to remember my dreams in greater detail than I do now. I dreamed I was lying awake in the early morning, listening. Or perhaps I was half asleep and half awake. There is a brief span of time when we cross over from one kingdom to another, with darkness on our left hand and morning on our right. The dreams we dream at that hour we often remember, perhaps because we do not have to carry them so long and so far.

So at that hour when we who live in both places belong to neither, I listened. Someone was calling my name. In my dream I climbed up on the window sill and looked past the broad copper roof that slanted over our sun porch. The patches newly laid on shone like my mother's brightest teakettle, which stayed bright because she never used it. Over the eaves above my window, the vine that my father said bloomed once every hundred years, and whose flowers I had never seen, wore clusters of orchids, heavy as grapes. Our neighbors' chimneys, our garage, our forsythia bushes, even our clothesline, had all disappeared. The land had gone back to oak and hickory and beech, the way it must have looked before white men built their homes on it.

Through that ancient forest marched animals: elk, moose, possum, bobcat, deer. No lions, no tigers, no elephants, only the animals that had played in my yard long before I did. They moved in a silent circle around the house. I knew from the cricle that they came as friends, because the circle was the shape of the games I played with my friends. It was the shape of our kindly kitchen table, where nobody got poked by sharp corners and no one sat higher or lower than anyone else.

So I did what any of you would have done. I climbed down the vine, clambered up on the back of the red-tailed deer who knelt to receive me, and I rode away with my new family into the forest.

My story does not end happily. Before I could find out what lay in the forest, my mother called me and I woke up. I have always felt sympathy for Coleridge at the moment he woke from his dream of Kubla Kahn's stately pleasure dome and was writing at white heat to catch it when the grocery boy arrived and the poem fled, ending itself with these lines:

Weave a circle round him thrice
,

And close your eyes with holy dread
,

For he on honey-dew hath fed
,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

We will never know how the milk of paradise tasted, and I will never find out where my magic animals wanted to take me. The lives of writers are one long tale of mothers calling at inopportune moments, children coming home from school in the middle of a chapter nearly finished, salesmen and grocery boys breaking into our solitude with armloads of lemons and ice cream.

A few years later, when I learned to write, I set down my dream, feeling greatly relieved that I did not have to carry it around in my head any longer. And since that dream was the first story I ever wanted to write, I have always respected the strong connection between the process of dreaming and the process of writing.

As a child I did not know where dreams came from. Innocent of Freud, I supposed they came from someone outside myself. To this unknown benefactor I gave the name Giver of Dreams, but by the time I was old enough to name him, he had got mixed up in my mind with the Sandman and with my mother, who also brought dreams, or so I was told in the lullabies my mother sang to me at night:

Your mother shakes the dreamland tree

and down fall little dreams on thee.

Mothers are always trying to convince us they are indispensable. I knew it wasn't she who brought dreams. They happened, somehow, inside my head, and I had a clear image of what I would find if I could lift off the top of people's heads, like a coffeepot lid, and peer into their minds. My father's mind would look like his laboratory. The shelves of crystals and beakers and bright fluids would stretch off into infinity. My mother's mind was an enormous sugar bowl full of receipts and torn snapshots.

My mind, of course, did not look like either of theirs. Mine was an office, a round, secret room, located inside the dreamland tree. The walls of the office were lined with shelves, and the shelves were stacked with papers, and the desk was stacked with papers too, but anyone could tell at a glance that the papers were all sham and show. They had lain there undisturbed for years. The yellowed edges rose when the wind fluttered those on top, showing the brighter color of those underneath.

The only cause of wind in that still place was the man who ran the office. The only really useful thing in the office was the old water pump, out of which ran words, dreams, memories broken off from events too dim and distant to see them whole. Lest anyone think it odd that I placed such value on a pump, I should explain that every summer till I was sixteen, I lived in a house that had lots of charm, lots of land, and no plumbing. It was my job to take the bucket from the top of the oven every morning, walk a block down the road to the well, and bring back water for the day. The first person at the well had to wake the water; it was always sluggish before breakfast and took its time coming up.

So in the office of my mind stood a magical pump. Sometimes you had to wake it. Sometimes it woke by itself. Writing is like that too, and we are all trying to find ways of making our words flow and of letting our ideas for stories come to us abundantly, one after another.

Education has not erased this image of the office and the pump and the old papers and the middle-aged man that runs the place. I wonder what image each of you has of the way your imagination works. For a writer, this is no frivolous matter. It is useful to have some acquaintance with the one in whose service you are employed.

Sometimes when a story is not going well, I have a strong desire to visit that office, to see that pump, and to meet that man. In this waking dream, I find myself standing at one side of his desk like a supplicant, facing a man who looks like a harassed journalist. You know the type—shirtsleeves and waistcoat, slacks, green eyeshade. I introduce myself. I am the writer. He introduces himself. He is the Guardian of the Well.

“I beg your pardon,” I say, “but I thought you were the Giver of Dreams.”

The Guardian shakes his head.

“She's tricky, that one. She's not reliable like me. I'm here right on time. I keep the place tidy. I do my job. You should see the stuff she sends me. She's outrageous. Not the faintest notion of good taste. But I take what she sends, I stick it together, I untangle it and shape it, and I send you the results. I hope you're satisfied?”

When I assure him that I have not come to register a complaint, he pulls up two swivel chairs. I get out my notebook and pencil.

“You've come to interview me,” he says. He examines my fifty-cent spiral notebook from Kresge's with great interest.

“Are you addicted to notebooks?” he asks, almost tenderly.

I admit that I am.

“And what use do you make of your notebooks?” asks the Guardian.

“I write down the things I want to remember,” I answer.

“And do you go back and read what you have written?”

Not until he asks does it occur to me that I almost never reread my notebooks, and suddenly I wonder why on earth I am keeping them. The Guardian does not wait for my answer.

“Some writers go back to their notebooks, some do not. I used to work for a woman who carried notebooks in her purse. She jotted down ideas for stories, conversations, memories, dreams. She was very scrupulous about jotting things down. But the notebooks, being small, were easily misplaced. The memories and conversations got mixed up with the grocery lists and bus schedules.”

“She was careless to lose them,” I said.

“She lost them because she didn't really need them,” said the Guardian. “That is true of a good many things we lose. Writing an observation in her notebook fixed it in her mind. What she wrote came back to her when she needed it. She did not have to refer to her notebooks when she started a story.”

“So she threw them all out?” I asked.

The Guardian smiled and shook his head.

“There came a day when she found herself in the middle of a story, ready to write a description of a cave. Six months before, she had visited a cave. She had described it minutely in one of her notebooks—but where was the notebook? She wrote very well about her cave from memory and finished the story, but the sense of loss continued to haunt her. So she gave up all her small notebooks and left several large notebooks in strategic places around the house. By the telephone; she was fond of dialogue. In the bedroom; she enjoyed her dreams. It is difficult to misplace a notebook bound in leather that one has paid five dollars for.”

“But she didn't need her notebook to write about the cave. Why should she bother to keep them?”

The Guardian leaned forward.

“You are a great admirer of Katherine Anne Porter's stories, are you not? She too faced this question. Fortunately for us, she recorded her answer in her journal:

I keep notes and journals only because I write a great deal, and the habit of writing helps me to arrange, annotate, stow away conveniently the references I may need later. Yet when I begin a story, I can never work in any of those promising paragraphs, those apt phrases, those small turns of anecdote I had believed would be so valuable. I must know a story “by heart” and I must write from memory. Certain writing friends whose judgments I admire have told me I lack detail, exact observation of the physical world, my people hardly ever have features, or not enough—that they live in empty houses, et cetera. At one time, I was so impressed by this criticism, I used to sit on a camp stool before a landscape and note down literally every object, every color, form, stick and stone before my eyes. But when I remembered that landscape, it was quite simply not in those terms that I remembered it, and it was no good pretending I did, and it was no good attempting to describe it because it got in the way of what I was really trying to tell. I was brought up with horses, I have harnessed, saddled, driven and ridden many a horse, but to this day I do not know the names for the different parts of a harness. I have often thought I would learn them and write them down in a notebook. But to what end? I have two large cabinets full of notes already.
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